Russian spies are outed, but will heads roll in Moscow?
Complacent Europe not ready for another Balkan meltdown
Find the words: фиаско, предвыборная кампания, злоупотребление, мошенничество, запугивание, блюститель законности, напряженность, нарушение, сепаратистские настроения, вмешательство в выборы, «утечка мозгов»
Answer the questions:
1) What is Dayton peace accord?
2) What is Republika Srpska?
3) How does the article characterize the elections? Give examples of violations.
4) Which countries were accused of meddling with elections?
5) What other suspicions does the article raise about Russia?
6) Speak about economic situation in Bosnia.
7) Speak about ethnic situation in Bosnia.
8) What are the perspectives of Balkan meltdown?
Marred by racial abuse, fraud and intimidation, the campaign for this weekend’s elections in Bosnia-Herzegovina has illuminated an alarming picture of rising instability across the entire Balkan region, where the reviving forces of ethnic nationalism, overtly and covertly backed by Russia, are locked in a contest for power and influence with pro-western, pro-EU parties.
Nearly a quarter of a century after it was signed, the complex Dayton peace accord that ended the Bosnian war shows signs of falling apart. Milorad Dodik, the separatist-minded leader of Republika Srpska (the Bosnian Serb region of Bosnia-Herzegovina), has waged a divisive campaign, stoking tensions with the country’s Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) community.
Dodik’s tactics, replicated to a lesser degree by Croat and Bosniak politicians, have been crude and blatant, according to a report last week by Transparency International. The anti-corruption watchdog recorded an “unprecedented” level of campaign violations by all sides. “The abuses, conducted in the most open manner, [included] direct threats and attacks, pressure on voters and vote-buying,” it said.
In one instance, Dodik, who is standing for the Serb seat in Bosnia’s tripartite state presidency, admitted a one-off payment to pensioners was a sweetener to win votes. He also threatened to sack workers at a publicly owned company if they backed a campaign rival.
But it is Dodik’s undisguised secessionist instincts, close links to Russia, and hostility to the EU that are fuelling fears of wider disintegration. He claimed last month that the US and Britain were interfering in the elections: Altogether, Dodik said, foreign governments, meaning EU countries and the US, had spent €200m trying to influence the polls. Both the UK and US deny meddling.
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His claims were backed by Aleksandar Vučić, Serbia’s president. When the elections were over, Vučić promised, he would present “astonishing evidence of the most brutal interference of certain western powers in RS [Republika Srpska]”.
Analysts detect Russia’s hand behind such allegations, pointing to Dodik’s latest, pre-election meeting with Vladimir Putin and Moscow’s close economic and energy ties to RS.
“Russia makes little secret of the fact that it will do what it takes to ensure the Orthodox Christian countries of former Yugoslavia do not join Nato,” wrote Ivor Roberts, former UK ambassador to Belgrade. It opposes countries seeking EU membership, too. According to Macedonia’s prime minister and US officials, Moscow manipulated last weekend’s referendum in which an allegedly Russian-financed nationalist boycott derailed Skopje’s hopes of joining the EU and Nato. Russia flatly denies these and similar claims relating to a failed coup in Montenegro in 2016.
Bosnia’s struggling economy – despite decades of EU assistance it remains one of Europe’s poorest countries – its endemic corruption, organised crime and media freedom problems, youth unemployment of around 50% and consequent “brain drain” are all factors feeding resurgent ethnic tensions and hardline nationalist rhetoric.
So, too, is the widely shared perception that Bosnia has been forsaken by an EU that has cooled to further enlargement and is more concerned with its own migration and nationalist-populist tensions. The flipside of aggressive Russian influence-peddling is European complacency, bordering on neglect. To complicate matters further, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s anti-EU, pro-Russia president, is championing Bosnia’s Muslims.
Is Europe prepared for another Balkan meltdown? It seems not. Is one brewing? It could be. After Dayton, Nato forces in the region numbered 54,000 troops. The EU-led military mission in Bosnia is now down to a mere 600. Like UN peacekeepers in 1995, they could find themselves hopelessly outgunned.
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Russian spies are outed, but will heads roll in Moscow?
Find the words: «наглые» попытки, сеять хаос, предположительно, перехватить, злонамеренные атаки, взлом системы безопасности, выслать
Questions:
1) What did the Dutch government announce about alleged Russian spies?
2) What was Britain's accusation?
3) What evidence did the Dutch counterintelligence present?
4) What was the reaction of Russian authorities?
5) What were the diplomatic consequences of spy scandals?
On Thursday, Western governments mounted a coordinated effort to unmask what they claimed were "brazen" efforts by GRU agents to sow chaos on foreign soil.
In a briefing Thursday, the Dutch government said it had foiled a "close-access hack operation" by the GRU aimed at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the world's chemical-weapons watchdog. The Dutch claimed that the four alleged agents planned to travel next to an OPCW-accredited laboratory in Switzerland, but did not get there because their operation was intercepted.
That same day, Britain accused the GRU of carrying out a worldwide campaign of "malicious" cyberattacks, and the US Justice Department announced criminal charges against seven GRU officers, accusing them of involvement in an effort to deflect attention from Russia's state-sponsored sports doping program.
The coordinated information dump revealed what appeared to be an embarrassing security breach for the GRU. Details in the Dutch briefing were particularly tantalizing: The head of Dutch counterintelligence named four alleged Russian GRU officers, noting that two of them had consecutive passport numbers, a potential red flag for intelligence agencies.
And then there was the taxi receipt: When detained, one of the alleged agents had a receipt for a trip to Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport from Nesvizkhskiy Pereulok, a road bordering what Dutch counterintelligence said was a GRU facility.
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The owner of the cab company confirmed to CNN that the receipt was authentic, but added that the driver couldn't recall whether any of the men named were indeed the passengers. Such details provided fodder for online sleuths, and raised questions among some observers about the GRU's level of professionalism.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov played the same note on Friday. Western governments, he said, were driven by "hysteria" and "spy phobia" after the US, the Netherlands and Britain publicly unmasked the alleged Russian intelligence agents.
To be sure, the latest round of spy wars has not been consequence-free for Russia. The US and its allies expelled dozens of Russian diplomats in the wake of the Salisbury poisoning, and the fears of Russian meddling persist: US lawmakers are considering new sanctions to punish Russia over its interference in US elections.
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